Prison Break
Chapter 4: the Initiation of the Fall Horimandeaus Bathe: A Succinct History of Stormgate There was burning and then there was burning. The escape from the high security prison had burned its mark across the political and social landscape. The Dominion had suffered humiliation; not only had an otherwise low-operating band of mercenary thugs managed to escape prison, but disarmed, dis-armored, and detained they had managed to kill one of their ace mages and escape the city. The dominion thrived on a perception of omnipotence, and incompetence and failure where poison to its existence. The post-op period was especially brutal. Commissar Tarkus had taken special interest in the how, the what, and the why of the so called “Stormguard”’s escape. He wanted background, motivation, reasoning, history, loved ones, ties, by god anything the regime could leverage into something that would make them the victors, or their opponents the villain. So the Blue-cloaks forensics unit got to work, analyzing the events and evidence of what happened. The first point of analysis was the naming of the group; of course a loyalist faction would refer to themselves as a guard. Protect the old ways, protect the old order; add in the obvious nationalistic use of Storm, the investigators believed, and it was as glaringly obvious as the sun. No law-abiding and loyal citizen would feel anything but contempt for the previous administration, let alone be willing to name themselves as anything wistful of the old times, or so the regime reasoned. They should have been tagged and bagged sooner, and the failure to do so was due to a lack of discipline on the part of the officer corps; re-education or dismissal should be the tools of choice. Clearly it was easier to believe in corruption of their own ranks over their own incompetence. The second; their guards were clearly incompetent or ill-trained. The escapee’s must have had outside help which either meant corruption or ill design. Considering the unimpeachable nature of their superiors, it must have been the former. Fourteen officers were sentenced to death on grounds of treason because of this, and a further fifty-three enlisted summarily executed. Still there were other avenues for knowledge, like the new risen noble families. The Ravinoff’s somehow remained above suspicion; they had sworn an oath of blood to be in the interests of Dtormgate, but despite their age-old blood loyalties they were impugnable. So true was a variety of others; that left only the newly risen and a handful of early noble backers. Assuming that those who had joined at great personal detriment (the early allies among the old nobles) would not be betrayers, this left the shiftless merchant class and new nobility. Regulation and scrutiny was coming to Stormgate; for the good of all, or course. This was the extent of what was, lacking a better word, public. The other machinations of the Stormguard had eluded the surface level analysis of the forensics squad and entered internal, and therefore external, legend. The prisons had been proven vulnerable. The actual conflagration was one thing; the destruction of the teleportation-lock had been another entirely. Whoever had done this had shown that they could break their prisons with impunity; if the regime couldn’t stop someone from teleporting in they couldn’t stop a full scale invasion. The Stormguard had not been the only ones to escape in the chaos, and it wasn’t entirely clear if the entire reason why they had gone to prison in the first place wasn’t contrived. How had the guards shown up so quickly at the scene of an otherwise undetectable crime? Especially packing such firepower, firepower that was now allegedly dead by their own hands? No self-respecting troop of that power would let one mage take them captive unless they wanted to. No, this must have been planned. Even more urgent was the destruction of Stormgate’s blood archives. The second most secure facility outside the palace, every informant, convict, and otherwise was now off the hook. The archivist general, a particularly demonic individual if reports are to be believed, in charge had been killed. They had tried to contain the information, but criminals are not as dumb as they let on. They knew that if the regime hadn’t managed to catch the damn fools, it’s because they had destroyed the blood repository. So they tested their boundaries, hesitantly at first, but when it became clear that no one was beholden anymore, sources disappeared into the wind. Suddenly the state intelligence agency went from all seeing to half-blind. The Stormguard itself had disappeared into the night. The few members whose descriptions still turned up positive scry-ID’s were clearly in the middle of nowhere or not in the city; the others were either unscryable or dead, it was uncertain. Whichever faction had planned this had done a good job, and for the first time in years the regime felt panic instead of confidence, and the city took note. Chapter II: The fall from grace: Stormguard or Stormfallen? Stromthurd Lecturn: The People’s History of Stormgate. How does a dream die? The first is through abandonment; in Stormgate the dream was fervently and methodically attended to. A city born on merit, ability, and dedication, where any man or woman could rise in the service. Yet those who fell, those who chose not to succeed in the tests of life often found other ways to better their situation. The nobles of the previous era did so by extracting from their subservient; the people turned into nothing more than money generation. In this new era, begun under Tarkus, there was a new ideal. The old failures were wiped away; the new and able rose to replace them. But still some fell through the cracks. Foreign emissaries who found their influence curtailed, local leaders who no longer could leverage their influence for personal profit, extra-national organizations, and mercenaries. The result was the cauldron that brewed the Stormguard, whose prison break sparked an internal crises amongst the Stormgate government. The Stormguard had managed to slaughter a few dozen good men in their escape. Notable among them was Crand, a solder and high ranking member of the bluecloaks. They had somehow managed to break the prison’s interdimensional lock, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the city’s criminal elements. By the end of the day a large portion of those held in the prison, or that were awaiting consignment had escaped. Normally this would have been no problem; the dominion archives had a store of ever criminal’s blood on hand for easy scrying. The Stormguard had destroyed the reliquary, and murdered the archivist-general in cold blood. The damage to the city’s ability to limit the criminal element was irreparably harmed. Post-break investigations determined that this was likely the Stormguard’s goal; brilliant detective work had revealed that they were a loyalist group with ties to the old Twin-kings monarchy. One of their members was even a scion of the Helmborn house, who were fervent loyalists that had lost their heads when their coup attempt against Tarkus failed. There were even possible ties to Oathstone, though whether this support was material or incidental was difficult to determine; they had certainly sent one of their warriors to the group. Further work revealed a deep web of corruption within the ranks of the bluecoats, and the perpetrators were quickly caught and punished. Attempts to locate them afterwards were stymied; they either couldn’t be scry’d or if they could were already far beyond the bounds of the Dominion’s borders. Tarkus was livid; the coming weeks would alter the course of his government and of Stormgate forever. Category:Summary